


the ghost of unbroken love

by nott_the_best1



Category: The Last Hours Series - Cassandra Clare, The Shadowhunter Chronicles - Cassandra Clare
Genre: Discussion of Bullying, Heavy Angst, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Post-Book 2: Chain of Iron, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Spoilers for Book 2: Chain of Iron, alfred the emotional support hedgehog (OC), elias is a bad dad
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-13
Updated: 2021-03-12
Packaged: 2021-03-20 17:20:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30008295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nott_the_best1/pseuds/nott_the_best1
Summary: thomas pays the carstairs home a visit once the dust has settled (COI spoilers!)
Relationships: Alastair Carstairs/Thomas Lightwood
Comments: 9
Kudos: 56





	the ghost of unbroken love

**Author's Note:**

> CW: PTSD, implied child abuse, bullying
> 
> this gets into alastair's head and is a bit dark, so be warned! i'm planning on writing a couple more chapters to bring them to a good resolution. 
> 
> the title is from the song "silhouettes" by sleeping at last

_"I feel the pressure building until I can't breathe_  
_And it takes everything_  
_It all spills out_  
_Reckless but honest words leave my mouth"_

_-_ "Anger", Sleeping at Last

Alastair’s eyes widened in surprise when he opened the front door to see Thomas Lightwood standing before him. “What are you doing here?” 

“Hello to you, too,” he replied, his eyes narrowing as he looked at Alastair’s hands. “Why do you have a hedgehog?” 

He turned away slightly, gently stroking the hedgehog in his palm. “Excuse you, don’t be rude to Alfred.” 

Thomas gave a slight smile. “My apologies, Alfred. Wait- Isn’t that Christopher’s hedgehog?” 

Alastair’s eyes flared, clearly offended. “He is not! He was merely watching him for a few days.” 

“Ah, I do think he mentioned that. My mistake.”

“You still haven’t answered my question.” 

“Since when do you have a pet hedgehog, though?” 

He tried to focus on the feeling of Alfred squirming in his palms and not on the tall, handsome masterpiece of a man standing before him, or on the memory of what his lips and skin tasted like. “If you’re here to try to change my mind-” 

“I’m not, don’t worry. I just… I thought that perhaps we could talk, now that some of the excitement has passed.” 

Alastair sighed. “Fine, come in, then, before you freeze.” 

Thomas followed him in, shaking some of the melting ice and snow from his hair and hanging up his coat. His nose and ears were red from the cold. 

“It truly would not kill you to wear a hat, you know,” Alastair commented. 

Thomas raised an eyebrow. “Well, I’ve a reputation to uphold, don’t I? What would my friends and I be known for if not our aversion to hats?” 

“Besides being a nuisance, you mean?” 

Thomas smirked. “Kit did look after Alfred for you.” 

“Believe me, any time I mention you and your Merry boys, I never mean Christopher.” 

He chuckled. “That’s fair.” Thomas’ eyes drifted to the piano. Alastair cursed silently to himself, realizing that he’d left the fallboard open earlier. “You play?” 

“I…” Alastair hesitated. He certainly used to. He wanted to, again. He could play music from a sheet without much effort, though he was still rusty, but playing written music was never what Alastair had enjoyed about playing. He’d always found his joy in creating, in taking written words and crafting it into a beautiful melody. That had been what he was attempting earlier, before he’d gotten overwhelmed and abandoned the project to fetch Alfred to calm him down, before Thomas had arrived at his doorstep. But it was a lost cause, for the part of Alastair that created, the part that dreamed, had died long ago. “Sometimes. Sometimes I do.” 

Thomas pulled something out of his coat. “I, uh, I brought you something. I thought… Well, I’m not sure what I thought. I’m certainly not an expert in dealing with grief. But this is one of the books I read after Barbara died, and I thought it was a helpful distraction, and I figured at the very least you could amuse yourself with my trying to make sense of it all in the margins.” 

Alastair gave him a small smile while placing Alfred down on the sofa and accepted the book. It was a volume of Sufi poetry, written in Farsi and Arabic. “Thank you, this… it means a lot.” 

The conversation stumbled awkwardly for the next few minutes until finally Thomas made a pensive noise. “May I… May I ask you something?” 

Alastair paused. “You may.” 

“Why are you still friends with them?” 

Alastair cast a dark gaze away from him. “I already told you, I-” 

“You have no friends, I know. But you certainly pretend to be friendly with them, at the very least. You certainly don’t treat them anything like the way we’ve treated you.” 

_ You _ don’t treat them anything like the way you’ve treated me, he wanted to say, but he knew that he would be deflecting to bring it up now. The truth was that Alastair asked himself the same questions. Why was he civil with them, friendly even? Why did he placate his father knowing how he would still treat him? He was sure he could see the wheels turning in Thomas’ brain, though his face betrayed none of it, wondering how badly they could have truly treated him if he was able to stay so amicable with them. Alastair, too, often worried if his own memories were lying to him, tricking him. “I can hardly blame them, can I? When I myself have done horrible things?” 

Thomas hesitated. “That- That’s not really fair, is it?” 

“I’m not sure what you mean.” 

“Well, it sounded like, at the time, you hadn’t done anything yet. At least, not to them.” 

“What’s it matter? What goes around comes around.” 

“More like what comes around goes around. Life isn’t just some twisted justice system, paying for crimes you hadn’t yet committed. What reasons did they have for treating you the way they did? Have they apologized?” Alastair’s brain stalled as Thomas added, “Do you think they owe you one?” 

Alastair could feel his heart beating, blood rushing to his head, his chest constricting. “Why are you doing this?” he demanded a little too forcefully. “I told you to leave me alone!” 

Thomas took a daring step towards him. “I think you think you deserved it. You think that you’re a monster, that you’re dangerous, a terrible person. You think that means they were justified in hurting you. That’s bullshit, Alastair. No one deserves to go through what you did, even someone who is terrible, and you are not. You’ve done bad things, certainly, but you’ve had reasons for doing each of them, and not one was that you are a terrible person. You are none of the things that you call yourself. You are strong and resilient and compassionate, and you love with your whole heart even those who do not deserve it.” 

Alastair took a step back. “You’re wrong.” He wasn’t. Alastair hated feeling so seen, so vulnerable. He wanted to scream.  _ Why wasn’t it enough, then? _ His love was never enough to make his father want to change, to get better. It was not even enough to get him to stop throwing things at him whenever the night quit going his way. His love was not enough to make Charles love him back. Even the boys at the Academy, Augustus and the rest, he’d spent so much time and energy trying desperately for them to genuinely like him, but it was never enough. He was fairly certain that it never would be. Thomas was wrong, Alastair was none of the things Thomas believed him to be, he was weak and pathetic and whatever love he held inside of him was broken at its core. “You ask me why I treat the boys from school better than you treated me, but why do you? You and your friends have  _ never _ given them a fraction of the grief you’ve given me, even Augustus after he hurt your sister so terribly. Why?” 

Alastair could see the defenses light behind Thomas’ eyes. “Don’t talk about Eugenia as if you know what happened!” 

Alastair looked him in the eyes without a hint of expression on his face. “I do, and I know because she told me.” 

Thomas stumbled on his words, unsure of how to respond. 

“I told you why I was cruel to you lot at school, but I did not tell you why I spread that rumor. The truth is that I was hurting and I was  _ scared _ and  _ all _ I wanted was for you to leave me alone, but you wouldn’t. And then Matthew came, running his mouth with his endless nonsense, poking fun at the way I looked and reminding me yet again that there is not a single person on this Earth who sees me as anything more than an afterthought. And so I repeated that rumor to him. And I repeated it again, and again, because I was  _ angry _ , because when Matthew blew up my belongings, my father decided that the cost to replace them was more than simply the coinage at the shops.” Alastair inhaled, pushing away the memory of the fury in his father’s eyes when he came home that semester. 

Releasing a shaky breath, Alastair continued, “And I  _ know _ . I know that wasn’t fair to him, or to you, or to your parents. But I have been trying to apologize for five months, only you decided without even hearing my apology that I did not deserve forgiveness. What now, Thomas? Now that you know my secrets, you’ve seen my scars? Do I deserve forgiveness? Do I deserve to be hated? Because truly I cannot keep track.” He gestured to the door, his voice now angry. “Who are you to decide what is deserved and undeserved? You do not get to come here and pretend like you understand me or my life. You and your friends think that you’re better than everyone else, but I have a secret for you: you are not morally superior simply because you are less broken than the rest of us. Get out of my house.” 

“Alastair-” Thomas tried, but he was cut off. 

“Leave, Thomas. And put me out of your mind. I left Charles because I did not wish to be his secret, and I will not be yours, either.”

Thomas looked like he was about to speak, but stopped himself. He looked hurt and confused, something like a wounded puppy. Alastair would not flinch. Finally, he obliged, though he turned at the last moment. “I’m sorry,” he said in a small voice, though not ingenuine. Alastair shut and bolted the door without responding. 

Once the door was secure, Alastair sank to his knees, a million thoughts and feelings flooding his brain, from relief to anger to utter despair. Shaky breath after shaky breath, he attempted to piece the world back together again.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! come visit me on tumblr @nott-the-best


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